Private Berlin (Private 5)

“Ilona?”

“Yes.” But her response was wrought with doubt and fear.

Mattie twisted in her seat when Burkhart opened the rear door.

“Please tell me Niklas’s going to be okay.”

Burkhart put his giant hand on hers as the rain began to pour. “He’s going to be, Mattie. You just have to have faith.”

CHAPTER 122

FRIENDS, FELLOW BERLINERS, I am standing by a big pine tree in the light rain just inside the woods northeast of the rear entrance to the orphanage. I am wet but more than pleased when I hear the crunch of tires as a car pulls off onto the shoulder out on the main road south of Waisenhaus 44.

A moment later I hear a car door open, but no dome light goes on inside. A second door opens. Still no light.

It makes me feel that my suspicions were justified. I slip around the back of the pine tree and press myself tightly to it, chilled to the bone, watching that rear entrance, figuring that this will be how the counterterrorism expert Burkhart will try to outflank me while Ilona Frei and Mattie Engel go through the front door.

They’ll be scared shitless, I think, and my heart races.

A mother. A son. A ghost from my past. Their combined fear.

Once Burkhart is dealt with it will be like old times, I decide. One last celebration before I move on.

I stay frozen to the tree, waiting after they’ve gone. One minute. Two minutes. At three minutes, I’m starting to think I’ve overthought things and that I should be moving quickly into the orphanage before they can find Nick.

But at three minutes thirty seconds, I become aware of a change in the darkness in front of me. And then I see it, the subtle dim green glow of some sort of night-vision device.

I cling tighter to the tree, my pistol in my right hand, aimed toward the glow. But then I lose it. Gone.

I peer and peer and see nothing. I’m running out of time.

A twig snaps. I slide around the tree, moving the gun toward the sound.

I hear a low voice: “Go in slow. Let him talk to you first.”

At thirty yards: a rectangular glow, much brighter.

He’s looking at his cell phone.

Horrible time to be texting, I think, and shoot twice.

I hear both rounds hit flesh and bone, a gasp, a cough, and then a satisfying crash that’s soon drowned by the rain pelting the woods.

CHAPTER 123

“BURKHART?” MATTIE MURMURED into her mic as they approached the ruins of Waisenhaus 44. She’d heard him gasp and cough. Now all she could make out was static and rain transmitting through the bud.

“What is it?” Ilona whispered. “What’s wrong?”

For a second Mattie didn’t know what to do. That gasp. That cough.

And then it just didn’t matter. Niklas was somewhere inside the ruins of the orphanage. She was going to bring him out of there alive.

Alive, she said to herself over and over as she got out her gun, and they climbed up onto the porch of the place. Mattie led Ilona through the busted front door past the entrance to what had been Hariat Ledwig’s office.

r /> When they reached the bottom of the staircase, Mattie called out, “Falk!”

But they heard nothing but the rain and wind. They checked the dining room and the kitchen. Nothing.